


a place you could escape sometime

by scrxbble



Category: Dimension 20 (Web Series)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, One Big House, Photographs, aelwyn doesn't feel like this is home exactly, but maybe it's getting there
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-22
Updated: 2020-05-22
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:02:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24322480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scrxbble/pseuds/scrxbble
Summary: Aelwyn Abernant wakes up to an empty house she doesn't live in, exactly.
Relationships: Adaine Abernant & Aelwen Abernant, Aelwen Abernant & Everyone
Comments: 8
Kudos: 86





	a place you could escape sometime

**Author's Note:**

> you know when you wake up from a sleepover or in a hotel room and you don't know where anything is but you have to pee? yeah, that, but for a month and you live there.  
> 

The house was empty when Aelwyn woke up.

She panicked for a second when she couldn’t hear Adaine’s steady breathing in the bunk above her. A million insanities ran through her head, kidnappings and abandonments and her parents, back and vengeful. She steeled herself, took a deep breath, and checked her phone.

There were two notifications: one text from her sister, who was alive and well and at the farmer’s market with who Aelwyn presumed were her party members, and three texts from Jawbone, asking about a desk for her room and telling her that he, Sandra Lynn, Lydia, and Ragh would be back around one from Lydia’s appointment. Jawbone had also sent a picture, ninety percent his beaming face and ten percent a midnight blue desk that from the looks of it, had a few more drawers than Adaine’s did, sitting in the corner of the room. Aelwyn texted back a few short replies: to Adaine, to have fun and not bring back another houseplant that she won’t take care of, and to Jawbone, that the blue looked good.

Half of her mind laughed at her. _You’re such a coward, scared of waking up. Even if something had happened, how would you even be able to help?_ The other half was reassuring, soft. _It’s good to be alert, but you can afford to take breaks sometimes._

Aelwyn didn’t know which was right. All she knew was that her throat was scratchy with sleep and the house was silent for the first time she could ever remember.

She took the spiral staircase downstairs. Normally she would avoid the main areas, slip through a secret passage from the back of the closet to the pantry, but there was no one to see her. Jawbone wouldn’t trap her in a conversation, Kristen wouldn’t throw an offhand glance her way, Lydia wouldn’t offer her a beaming smile that Aelwyn didn’t think she deserved. Today, though, the house was empty of these traps. She took the spiral staircase and let her fingers run across the spines of Adaine’s books on the way down.

The house felt too unfamiliar for Aelwyn having lived there a month and more. She expected there to be more stairs and almost tripped when she found flat ground. The living room felt too full of furniture and the dining room was bigger than she anticipated. She kept thinking she would turn corners and find her father’s study, the breakfast nook, the library with the big chairs next to the fireplace that she would study in sometimes after everyone else had gone to sleep. It was always a nasty shock when she remembered that those places were gone. Ash and rubble stood where her home used to be.

Her split mind argued again. _It’s a good thing, they were places where your parents filled your mind with hate. It’s a bad thing, all those memories are gone, don’t you want it to go back to how it was?_

The kitchen was right off the dining room, big and open and white. It took Aelwyn a few false tries to find the glasses in the cabinet next to the sink, but she filled one up with tap water and leaned against the counters. There was what used to be a tray of cinnamon rolls on the stove, long since cold, and a note in scratchy handwriting Aelwyn didn’t recognize.

_Take ONE! There’s enough for Riz, Fabian, and Gorgug if you want to bring them each ONE!_

Twelve traces of cinnamon buns lined the cookie sheet, circle of white frosting and crumbs that had the odd finger scoop through them - Fig’s work, if Aelwyn had to guess. One was left, perfect white icing over a golden swirl of dough, and Aelwyn would eat it warm if she knew where the microwave was. She added it to the list of things to ask Adaine about and grabbed the cinnamon bun cold.

Aelwyn needed more than a few tries to find the living room again. The door she thought went back out to the dining room was suddenly a secret staircase up to somewhere Aelwyn had never seen, and the hallway was a maze of doors that didn't look like they all fit in the house. She made it on accident, thinking she’d find her way to the foyer and then get to it from there but stumbling out next to the fireplace and nearly knocking over a picture frame on an end table piled high with stacks of psychology books and what looked like a theology textbook.

The picture was - her. Her and eight other people, standing in a group outside Mordred Manor, on the hill where Adaine’s ghost friend lives. No, she realized, ten other people if you count ghosts and the tip of Fig’s head. She remembered it better now, the day Jawbone had insisted they take a family photo, marched everyone out to the hill for good lighting, given Gilear the job of photographer. Kristen and Tracker were in the center, beaming halfway at the camera and mostly at each other, Tracker halfway to tickling Kristen under her ribs to make her smile wider. Ragh was squatting next to his mom, family resemblance clear in their grins and the way he held onto her shoulders so tenderly it looked like he would break if he let go. Jawbone was as cheery as Aelwyn had always seen him, arms around Sandra Lynn and Adaine, neither of whom looked thrilled. Sandra Lynn was glaring at the corner of Fig’s horns that were still visible, because Fig had squirmed her way out of the photo at the last second, claiming that while she was working on being more open, she wasn’t sure if that applied to large group photos and that she would just help Gilear, it was her turn to be an assistant, the Vice Principal Lunch Lad needed a photography student. Adaine was smiling, at least, arm in arm with Ayda, but her eyes were flat even as Zayn stuck his translucent tongue out behind her head, and Aelwyn knew why.

They’d had a fight the night before, the worst they’d had since Aelwyn redeemed herself in that awful forest. She couldn’t remember it exactly, but she knew the generals: Adaine screaming in her direction with all her furious rage about something Aelwyn had said at dinner, some comment that would have been overlooked a year ago, when things were the way they had always been, something ungrateful and bitchy and all the other names Adaine could think of. Aelwyn hadn’t screamed back, though she’d wanted to feel her throat go raw with anger the way Adaine loved to do. She’d kept calm, like she always had to in their old house, and shot a nasty reply back, vicious with words about being second best and first to fail, how Adaine couldn’t talk about ungratefulness when she had been given all the opportunities in the world and ruined them for herself. Adaine had gone white with fury at that, her angry fists sparking with energy, had grabbed her pillow and stormed out to sleep in Fig’s room, leaving Aelwyn alone and lonely like she had never been before.

They hadn’t spoken for a week after that. Aelwyn suspected Jawbone had heard their fight - that the whole house had heard - and tried to get them to remember what family meant with a sunlit photo. Aelwyn wasn’t sure if it hadn’t worked because Adaine was the most stubborn person she’d ever met, or if it hadn’t worked because Aelwyn had never known what family meant in the first place and a single group shot wasn’t going to change that. She figured it was a combination of both. 

Aelwyn had apologized, eventually, after spending a week taking the back staircase down to the pantry to grab bottles of water for the room and eating the dinners that Sandra Lynn or someone left outside her door. It took convincing to get Fig to even let her into her piano bubble, and more convincing to get Adaine to look at her, but Aelwyn’s apologies, at least, were getting better. 

Or maybe Adaine had just hated being in Fig’s messy room.

Aelwyn stared at her own face in the photograph, amazed at how little you could see of the fight in it. Her smile was wide as anyone else’s, eyes bright with mirth, letting herself lean into Jawbone behind her and not looking like she had stayed up the whole night sobbing and hating herself for being so much her parent’s daughter, so much _herself_ , a self she didn’t like and barely recognized.

Aelwyn put the photo back down and argued with herself again. 

_You’ve changed, and you always had good in you. People don’t worry about doing bad things if they don’t care about being bad._

_They’ll see through your smile, and they’ll hate you just like they did before. Don’t get too attached to this life, Aelwyn. It won’t take long to lose it._

Aelwyn took a bite of cinnamon role to shut herself up and kept walking through the living room, passing more pictures on the wall: Fig and Sandra Lynn feeding Baxter, Kristen and Tracker with a plate of cookies and flour on their beaming faces, even one of the Bad Kids at one of their movie nights, their six faces half-turned to the camera, surprise and glee mixed on their faces. Jawbone had snuck a candid, Aelwyn guessed, not given them enough time to arrange themselves in poses that didn’t have Fig practicing braids on Gorgug’s hair or Fabian letting Riz sit on his shoulders to pelt popcorn at the screen. Adaine was curled up onto Kristen’s side, half-asleep and half mouth open to say something, either to scold Riz for getting kernels all over the carpet or, more likely, to suggest another form of ammunition. 

Aelwyn didn’t realize she was touching the photo until her fingers grazed over Adaine’s face in the glass. She looked sleepy and content, eyes half closed but still waving her hands towards the others, her legs draped over Fabian’s lap and Kristen’s arm casually using her forehead as an armrest.

Aelwyn couldn’t ever remember a time when Adaine had looked so tranquil, so safe at their old home. She couldn’t ever remember a time when Adaine had let her guard down, and she couldn’t ever imagine her mother or father letting them sprawl across the living room floor and throw popcorn at the television screen. They didn’t even have a television, and if they did, the old Adaine and the old Aelwyn wouldn’t have been sharing popcorn in front of it, much less falling asleep on the other’s laps.

Even so, the picture was familiar in a way that was nagging Aelwyn, familiar like an old song that you can barely hear over the noise around you but you know you’ve heard before. She strained herself to listen to it, to place her sister somewhere safe and happy, but the only memories she had of Adaine were fraught with stark white walls and sneers that gave Aelwyn a pang of guilt to remember. 

The sound of a car door broke Aelwyn from her reverie. The picture on the wall seemed to come to life as its inhabitants piled out of a van in the driveway, shouting about something that was pointless and all-too-important at the same time. All of a sudden, Aelwyn felt exposed in the living room, felt like prey waiting for the people who actually lived in this house to come in and recognize her and kick her out. Their voices got closer, laughter ringing out threateningly, and Aelwyn, cheeks already burning with the shame of being somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be, flashed over to a bookshelf on the wall, pulled it aside and disappeared into the wall, taking a set of stairs up to a secret landing and climbing another two flights before spilling out through Adaine’s closet, batting away jeans and big cotton sweaters to clamber out and fall into a sitting position up against the bed, the hard wood against her back grounding her and chasing away the traces of panic beginning to rise in her throat.

There were two thoughts that ran over Aelwyn’s mind, not arguing like before, but flashing by in tandem.

_It’s stupid to run away from them, half of them don't even live here. They can't kick you out of the house you're staying in._

_I didn’t get lost on my way up here._

The last one put a smile on Aelwyn’s face even as her chest heaved from her sprint up three flights, and by the time Adaine had Messaged her to come downstairs and have a bubble tea, they brought her two because they weren’t sure which she’d like, Lydia just got back and she and Ragh are making grilled cheese for lunch, Aelwyn was almost certain she could find her way back downstairs with perhaps only a few wrong turns.

Her house was full again.

**Author's Note:**

> title is a lyric from jackie and wilson by hozier  
> more aelwyn rights can be found at aelwynrights on tumblr (i have a brand)


End file.
